i bought two carnations, one red and one yellow with pink edges, smooth petals marblized with curvy sweeps of pink, almost like very quiet blood had tipped the edges and seeped down toward the center of the flower. and the center of a carnation is an amazing thing, anyway, folded in on itself in a way that only the flower and i understood last night, and that only the flower knows now.
so i bought the flowers and got on a bus to go downtown. it was okay; i had a hat. but i stopped the bus (interesting to me then that i could stop the bus, all by myself, just by pulling the cord and the bus would stop where i wanted it to, fascinating in the way it was fascinating to think about how just by living i accumulate all this extra added stuff i don't want and i put it in bags and set it outside and people come and take it away, it's just gone, and i wish realife were like that more often) and walked down to the convenience store by where i used to live to see the clerks i know there and to buy some cough drops, significantly cherry drops.
then i walked to the student union, which was farther away than it usually is, probably because of the cold. i could feel the stems of the flowers flowing under my fingers, shaping themselves to somethingelse. so i went through the union and down the drag, heading downtown just because it seemed like a place to be; it was only midnight. and there was a puddle of light in a 7-11 parking lot, with not enough cars to soak it up, concrete already supersaturated with it like a disintegrating paper towel, and in the middle of the light a pretty boy on rollerblades making patterns with his body on the street. i watched for a while but did not want to be rude, so i moved on, walking down guadalupe.
first church of christ, scientist. jesus in a lab coat, with a scanning tunnelimg microscope using atoms as his lego set? would a deity even need science?
and i felt the capitol building drawing me nearer. and wondered if they let you in at midnight on a saturday. i crept up on it, silent, hearing the little slapping sounds the soles of my shoes made against the street, walking along a sidewalk and realizing that if i continued i would be at the capitol, which is what it wanted. and i was there, standing in front so close that i couldn't see the dome anymore, and i turned around and saw all the lights of congress avenue stretching out away, far over the bridge and down past the edges of town, and i thought: i am the only person that the city has imagined right now.
so i walked to seventh street, to a payphone, and i tried to call a friend, only she wasn't home. so i called my exboyfriend (strange, i think, that with all the men in my life, whenever i say exboyfriend i'm invariably referring to glenn). he's a wastoid, more or less, someone who will prolly live the life he lives now until he dies, never changing, never moving, just letting events and people flow over and around him, down to the sea. it was surreal, standing at a payphone on 7th street at midnight, listening to glenn talk about the night of our worst fight when i scratched him so deeply there's still a scar, discussing conversationally the types of pain we inflicted on each other. and there's a balloon in the street, silver-gray, stretched tight full of air, and i want it. so i ask him to hold for a moment, please, and he says he's going to sleep. but i wanted the balloon, so i dropped the phone and took the balloon, only it wasn't as much fun as i'd thought it would be to have. when i got back to the phone, he was either asleep or pretending to be, and i thought about how the whole episode was a microcosm of our entire 18 months together. so i left the phone very carefully off the hook and continued on my way.
i walked a block over to sixth street, which is always full of peple on weekend nights, and went to a convenience store to get my bearings, only they weren't there. so i bought a koala kiwi-grapefruit-lime carbonated beverage instead. then i walked back down the street until i ran out of street. thre was a man riding a bicycle, insane on such a crowded sidewalk, weaving in and out of people like it was normal. he stopped next to me at a red light and i looked at him and said "they're all insane." he laughed and the light changed and he rode off. then another man started walking beside me, asking me questions that i replied to in an amused, tolerant, weirded-out manner. i found myself explaining to this total stranger that i was, in fact, terribly ugly, and that just because he didn't think so didn't really prove anything, and finally i ducked into a club to get away, except the club was the one i'd been heading to all along.
i stood in the dark club, not much warmer in here than out there and in here is an illusion, because once you get inside the front door you're really outdoors again, a covered stage and a couple of bars and a lot of people wandering around. "hey, there's no one on the stage" "cool, let's go play" i thought i heard people saying that, and then i heard dissonance, terrible dissonance and feedback and then it started to resolve itself into music and then the music became a twisted version of a really bad song from the mid70s and i opened my eyes and the band looked like a twisted version of a really bad song from the mid70s. i went out to the picnic tables in the back patio and sat quietly, looking at my flowers and at a cough drop, so pretty in the light because as i turned it over and over in my fingers, sticky bits of it stayed behind and my fingertips left a barely discernable pattern on its surface, delicate lacy lines running through this coughdrop and i felt someone sit next to me on the table but i was too busy to talk to him and he finally stomped off. then a person walked up to me, a terribly normal person wearing chinos and a buttondown in the midst of people in leather and tie-dye with tattoos and extreme hair and he asked me "what kind of place is this?"
i was too weirded out to answer and just shook my head and walked over to ask some people if reality was still there okay and tried to explain about the clueless wonder. they were amused but it was too cold so i went inside to where the pool tables are, away from the band and the cold, lots of bodies in a room and it was warm. and i was making my way across the room when someone came up behind me and put a hand over my eyes and said "ve are taking you vith us because ve vant your body." and and he walked me backward with no clue who this person was, none at all, and then he deposited me next to the bar and said "you're not ann." so i stood there for a while and this guy started saying "hey, i'm cool, cool enough to be at emo's, hey, this is the new fashion" and he pulled his shirt down to show his tattoo "see, i really am cool enough to be here, no really." parody. making fun of the whole herd i'mcoolerthanyouare mindset there. but then these other guys, guys who worked there, started walking through the crowd bellowing "go home, get out of here, everyone take off, go home already" so i left, swallowed up in a crowd pushing toward the door as if we had any reason to hurry, finally to be spit out onto the street but nothing looked quite the same anymore and it's cold. so i went down to seventh street, to where a friend's car is, and i left a carnation, the red one, on his car. then i went to the convenience store where i had been earlier and bought some coffee.
i had to be very careful pouring the coffee into the white styrofoam cup, and then i poured in a little vial of half and half and watched. it went down in a straight line, sinking down to the bottom of the cup, but then it swirled out and while i watched it traced designs on the surface of the coffee, light light brown reached out into the darker coffee-coffee and pulled it in, mixing itself, insinuating itself into everything. magical coffee, it was making the same pattern that was in my carnation of its own volition. i paid for the coffee and stood there a moment, sipping it, watching how the cup narrowed and the coffee, mixed now but still not a uniform color, moved along the white styrofoam, which itself had patterns running through it.
back out on the street it felt like the universe knew what i was doing and was trying to make it as weird as possible. there were people acting like there was a fight about to happen, and i became wary, frightened, but not sure if it was real or if i was just imparting motivation to a random collection of strangers. i lost hold of reality again, trying to figure out what was happening, and decided i should just walk to a tea bar down the street and have some more coffee and sit and think. so i did, sitting at a table between a pente game on my right and a scruples game on my left, snatches of conversation about the clear stones being mixed in with the yellow ones and about if a cabbie offred to leave the receipt blank what would you do swirling around my head like the cream in my other coffee. this time the coffee is black, and i sipped it slowly from a teacup, watching the reflection in the midnight coffee surface of my thumb on the white porcelain lip of the cup.
i was alone in a room full of people who were together but it felt okay, felt good, and i realized that the strange feeling in my abdomen was a full bladder and that i didn't know where the ladies' room was but that was okay. then i started looking at the carnation again, and was captivated and then cycled back to my bladder. so i drank the rest of the coffee, noticing that my body had sucked all the heat from the liquid and that coffee that had been hot enough to make the cup burn my hands was now cold, cold as outdoors. i stood up and walked back to the bathroom, and afterward i stood in front of the mirror and stared at my mouth and said to myself "it's okay, you're in control, you know who you are, you know where you are, it's all the way you want it."
it was 4 am. i called a cab and went home and stood in the hallway in front of the heater until i was too warm, way too warm (feeling my skin to see what temperature it had become), and then i stood in the dark bathroom in silence and listened to the night, watched the dark and saw things i didn't understand at all. then i laid down quietly in my bed, covered over with blankets, and watched movies in my head until all of a sudden it was noon and bud was telling me i had a phone call and then tortilla chips in bed with a book before a hot shower and walking a mile and a half to be here, writing this now.
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sine | deb
not a bad way to spend the weekend.